A Serious Business

NOTE: Physical violence, gore, abuse, and fictitious representations of religious and national figures.

Seriously? He can’t be serious.

‘D! You can’t be serious right now.’

But of course the earnest chap was never not serious. At least in mixed company. On both counts.

This, his clearly sober stationing of horse and—oh—I…can’t look.

The other guy’s readying.

He’s quite nearly there, my guy, that is. This, yes, he’s continuing, no matter how massively he might alter the whole of history, let alone the sacred cannons of—dunno—nations, and billions besides!

‘Davidi! Seriously! Take off that ridiculous armour. You’ve gotta give back the lance.’

Of course he will not know how big of a not good thing this is because of course he doesn’t do divination, which could have told him what three-thousand years of history and no sorcery need further proclaim: he quite literally will be standing, butt-naked, on the lawn, of yet another devil’s-luck madcap in just a few centuries from the one we just landed in. Chiselled into marble, no less. Marble!

If only he just refuses the helmet.

And…yep, he’s put on the helmet. And, now the spurs. ‘You needn’t spurs, Davidi!’ You raving clot of insanity! ‘How the hell do you even know what to do with them?’

Damn me, I should never have let the man-boy download the future. ‘Though I shan’t search out anything of myself or kin, of course. Divination.’ Yeah. Right.

I press my hand to his knee, half panting from the race over, half crying. Well, now, just hyperventilating.

‘Dodi…’ He nudges my hand away. Smiles, and gently shuts his visor.

‘This is no bear-lion attack. You’re not you, in there!’

You’re the sheep. No, I am…or will be when the recording’s played back… ‘Oh, me oh my.’ I take the ground seat. ‘Baaah…’

And the priest-scribe for whom Alfred’s court has recording in this time, whinnies and steps back.

‘And now everyone’s an equestrian.’ And now he fully takes the cue that I’m the mad one, and puts two more measures between us.

* * *

So…that was a disaster as I had warned. Bloodied, one eye hanging loose, and—thank eternity for my time machine: but for it, there go he—near death’s door, we skip the court’s surgeons for what lies in the cave, risking, of course, the charge of witchcraft to save a life that otherwise would be forfeit anyway.

I do a bang up job of it, if I do say so—and he said so, in his form of contrition. And, without a trace of his earlier stupidity made manifest, then erased, Davidi and I return to the king’s tent. He, of course, acts as if he’s had it all under control from his mother’s teat. And, I, who was—again, must I remind everyone—the sane one in this episode, am yet the one shedding my weight in sweat.

But, of course, his chill makes us revered men, untouchable, lauded, even, except by the one. And so, his way, as usual, wins out. And so he winks my way. And before I can intimate on the sly the cuff I wish to truly connect to his smug, near-flawless face, a voice calls to us.

‘David and…’ The king beckons him and the one whose forgotten name matters none.

‘Lord King.’ Davidi says this to his peer of another era as would an international rugby star to an international inferior. Because, of course, of course, everyone’s dim to his great light—even one already a king. But only I catch this. To everyone else, the bow and less reverent jockeying is fitting. Two men of standing. Their lackeys. Proper. Right.

But one guy, the one who had unseated Davidi; the only one whom earlier I had failed to block from view of the damage, he, in a reverse of all that was holy, looked through Davidi and right into my soul. I nearly lost the ghost. And my silent sputtering caused its own holy upheaval.

‘Man, what is the matter?’ asked Alfred, before remembering protocol. ‘What is the matter with your man, Lord Benyshai?’

No longer confused, Davidi turned to see what indeed was the matter. But all he could find was me recovering from a threat no one else seemed to have witnessed. So, I coughed once more. Then twice for good measure, and Davidi WTF-ed me, and I waived an ‘I’m good’, and he waived my condition off with a ‘Not everyone’s constitution’s up to travel’, and a smile, plus a knowing nose tap and shrug, subtexting: The help, whatchya gonna do.

Alfred returned the knowing and beckoned Davidi to the high table beside himself.

I, fuming and afraid, arse-hinted my disapproval by landing it firmly down on the second bench below. My protest registered with exactly no one.

By the third course of food in which, incredibly, Davidi had found a way to feign delight, with nary a bite taken—there was pork, most likely—spirits all around were high.

And save for Davidi, whose playacting masked this fact, and Alfred, known the world over for such sobriety, everyone else, besides me—and I would find out, Davidi’s earlier opponent—were high as kites.

I joined in the revelry and sung. A bit. I had downloaded the entire canon from the era. Apparently Davidi hadn’t skimped either. Though, here and there he went mum for the dignity of his station. But otherwise he roused the crowd with his handsome, sing-along bonhomie. His alternating stares, even when paused, informed me I had no such luxury. I was to sing, sing, sing, and sing ‘til my own eye popped half out. Brother, please, my strategic muteness responded. He was not the boss of me.

In the end, my trespass against his natural order of things, as always, bit me in the rear. Because, after Alfred had long-departed, and most men not leaving, slept, mise en place—trenchers, tankard shards, slosh, and slop, no matter—Davidi strummed a tune on a nearby harp, ignoring me completely. Even when the guy came by to pull me outdoors—and I was certain Davidi’s missing my eye was no miss at all—sympathy for the plight of a man who had defied the great shepherd-king-to-be could not be found inside. I was on my own. And I was as a grasshopper in Davidi’s opponent’s eyes.

‘Yes?’ I queried feebly in an attempt at owning the conversation.

‘Look boy, I need your master to— Boy?’

I had started violently shaking. His sudden grasp right before this request(?), had transported the little I had consumed down my legs. It truly was a barbaric thing not to wear jockey shorts.

‘Ewww. Is that you, boy?’

Even boxers would have captured some of my shame. But boxers, briefs, or whatever a civilized day used and named that glorious cloth of male salvation, was not to be mine that balmy day in First Century Englaland.

I wanted to flee. But although the man had released me and stepped back a pace, I was stuck in place, mired in my own excrement.

He must have sensed my despair, because he warmed, grabbed both my shoulders, and said, ‘Come.’

My fear of this now-gentle giant clearly the lesser of lost pride and disappointment. I slinked along behind him, no longer debating whether Davidi might locate my remains in the morning or whether he’d leave without them.

‘Go on, lad.’ The oversized man was waving me towards an oversized hole in the ground. Save for the packed earth around it, no sign existed of its manmade provenance…until I stepped closer. The raised dirt surrounding the hole was perfectly oval. I would say it mirrored a twenty-, twenty-first century toilet, except, of course, this was made completely of sand and clay, and had been shaped more than a millennia before any of those pissants sat and shat upon one.

I sat, and immediately saw the curtain I had missed earlier. The man nodded. I pulled. And within seconds he handed me from below the curtain a warm, sudsy, rose-perfumed dignity back.

‘I was anglin’ for your master to take a look at this and a few of my potions. But I guess the sisters were spinning different threads.’ The man, Harold, he had informed me by then, looked straight at the tree’s trunk, as if the Fates resided directly under this particular one.

He looked up at my silence and perceived correctly that I was confused.

‘Oh, well, in addition to my position as tilt champion’—he scrutinized my face, and seeing no challenge, continued—‘I am also master of what some might call the pots.’

My download included chamber and privy, but a three-second scan could find no mention of pots as a synonym. So, now, as so often with Davidi, I was forced to help Harold accept at least one area of fallibility: he was speaking gibberish.

But before I could regain a bit more dignity on his account, he raised an arm and slapped a knee. ‘Pots. Ahhh.’—and here he chuckled, revealing two remnant teeth upfront—'I’ve tried to make it stick… Well, no lad, they call me Chamber Master. I’m the only one with humour in the bunch. The Dane blood, must be. So, chamber master it is.’ He shook his head almost wistfully.

‘Well, here, in Wessex, royal arses sit on royal chamber pots, and I, young lad, have the sole honour of it…you know’—and here he gestured for me to get it, and so I dutifully nodded, but for clarification’s sake, he added: ‘So’s the anointing’s never diminished. Dignificare’s all. Dignificare.’ Or dignity, it would later turn. And he’d be right in late Latin or in later English.

But that didn’t stop the other royal arse from clowning Harold once he found out the man’s trade. And…that jest, was soon to come.

‘What might the Royal Chamber Master seek with my…uhhum…master?’ (Oh it clawed, it clawed so badly. But, sometimes you’ve gotta take the toilet leavings as they come).

He smiled conspiratorially, and waited for me to get it again. I did not.

‘C’mon, man’—I had been upgraded, then—‘you and I know the damage I laid upon your master.’ He again checked that there was no challenge. ‘And I sense you’re no superstitious man, as neither am I.’ I indeed had been raised two fathoms or more. ‘So, we needn’t talk of witches or spells.’ He nodded once.

I acceded the point.

‘So, what Eastern potions do you carry on your person—or I assume, in your master’s baggage? Ones he mightn’t fret to depart with.’

‘Just, mind, the receipt should do,’ he added quickly, ‘Wouldn’t take a man’s only unction for the road.’

‘From whom are you planning to steal holy oil?’

Harold shot up, grabbing a sword and delivering a near-blow so quickly that mere inches separated a dead Davidi from the living, breathing, arrogant one who now side-eyed the man.

There’s no amount of unction that would have repaired what could have been. But there too was no quantity enough to shed a man like Davidi of his well-worn invincibility. So, I just shrugged at the gaping Harold and motioned him to move aside.

‘Master!’ In his ear I whispered, ‘Just go with it…’

‘Of course.’ And of course I despised the precedent he was assuredly setting.

‘So, now, oil? Theft? Criminal.’ Davidi smirked and stared pointedly at the man. Even in the fire-lit dimness, he nearly provoked another match. One fought with tools given to irrevocable damage.

‘Harold,’—I stressed the name and the censorship my face and tone was invoking—‘Harold here’s the king’s medicine man and—’

‘Chamber Master, son.’

‘Chamber—’

‘Harold—’ I was trying to outshout them both, but the very man was boasting. And of course, sore subjects always break through.

‘And tilt champion, young lad, Champion of the Tilts,’ he concluded, with a slap of his hilt.

As you can imagine, it took the night to douse that flame, and it took a further night before we could to get down to the business of unction, and receipts, and who possessed what baggage.

But the day and a half that followed proved my greatest education to-date. Because, although I had the ‘med-yee-sins’, as Harold feebly tried again and again to say, Davidi had just the right dose of…uhh…mmmm…Davidi-ness—that almost never failed to win him patronage and friends. Harold, no doubt, had we stayed, would have abandoned all to the loyal service of Davidi in the end, including his beloved, anointed Alfred. Hell, Alfred would have let him—joined him, abdicated his thrown for the privilege, the way things were going. But lucky for me—uhm, history—we...did not stay.

And yet, I dare say, my tutelage also had its day.

‘So, your people too suffer greatly from the…’ Colitis. That’s what I had informed him his master was most likely afflicted with. I could’ve given him certainty with a quick scan of my bio-marker, but, well…there’s not superstitious and there’s…well, I wasn’t willing to test it.

But I did explain the ailment: ‘Say we were to cut open the king’s belly—’

‘That is treason, young master.’

‘But—’

‘To even suggest…’

Davidi, ever the peacemaker when not waring, offered, ‘Well, were the treacherous bastard who even thought to touch a hair of your great king’s head to be split from prick to gullet…’ And here he opened the floor.

‘Yes…’ I said, stepping right into this white-gloved clearing, ‘And, uh, should said…uh, bast—uh, traitor, uhm, have those coil-y bits examined—’

‘And hacked to smaller bits along with his itty bits!’

‘Here, here!’ followed Davidi. Where, indeed, did he learn this stuff?

‘Here, here!’ And there downed Harold another glass of spirit, and Davidi, most likely, water.

And I could only shake my head in wonder.

But I trooped along, explaining how the ‘bloody snake’, if carrying the king’s same…discomfort…might show either broad inflammation—yes, swelling—or a local—shorter span, mhmm—enlargement.

And that proved enlightening.

To cap off my instruction, I readied potions of bone broth and leek tea; suggested common millet as replacement for wheat—‘He will never eat below his station, but, I have my ways of getting wise Alfred to agree’, said the proud Pots Master—and respectfully signalled by what candle length the master might retire to bed.

All in all, our remaining three weeks were, by all accounts—I’m being serious!—a grand, smashing hit.